Navigating Blockchain's Promise and Pitfalls: Comprehensive Insights into Architecture, Scalability, and Future

Due to its decentralized and transparent nature, blockchain technology has emerged as a revolutionary innovation that is transforming numerous industries. Blockchain offers several advantages for security and data integrity, but it has some limitations, especially in terms of scalability. The increasingly noticeable impact of storage capacity, processing speed, and latency as networks grow and transaction traffic increases contributes to a decrease in overall performance. These problems must be addressed to facilitate better blockchain adoption in different fields. This paper provides comprehensive reviews of blockchain technology, covering its architecture, key attributes, classifications, and consensus algorithms. Furthermore, we highlight recent research trends from 2019 to 2025, which are evaluated, highlighting continuous efforts to address those limitations. Our analysis shows that scalability remains the most important issue, with various interesting solutions being investigated to lessen its impact. This study not only synthesizes current knowledge but also indicates open research trends that might contribute to the widespread adoption and long-term integration of blockchain across various domains.